New Museum taps Rem Koolhaas’s OMA to lead its Bowery expansion

The New Museum has tapped Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu of OMA to design its expansion, which was first announced a little over a year ago. The new wing, located at 231 Bowery, will add 50,000 square feet to the existing museum, and provide visitors and artists with additional galleries, flexible spaces for new types of programming, and improve circulation.

In May 2016, the Museum announced that it would revamp a property adjacent to its home on the Bowery, and that it had already raised more than half the required funds to make that happen. The expansion will cost $85 million, and the project is expected to break ground sometime in 2019.

“Koolhaas has thought deeply about the identity and landscape of our city going back to his landmark book Delirious New York, published in 1978, a year after the Museum’s founding,” Lisa Phillips, the director of the museum, said in a statement. “Though he is one of the world’s finest architects with a deeply civic and public spirit, this will be his first public building in New York City.”

Shigematsu, a partner at OMA, is also working on the firm’s first NYC condo building in Gramercy. The New Museum is now the latest high profile project for the firm—and per the New York Times, which first reported the news, it’s the first public building that OMA will have designed in New York.

“I’m particularly excited that our first public building in New York City will be for the New Museum, one of the most forward-thinking institutions for which I’ve always had a great affinity,” Koolhaas said in a statement. “Having collaborated with Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa [the architects who designed the current building] on a number of projects in Europe, it is a real honor to stand alongside their great work of architecture, one of my favorites in the city.”

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